The Internet provides a vast array of materials, which are essential for legal, scientific, medical, accounting, consulting financial, business evaluation, and insurance work. These materials include textual documents, multimedia materials, databases, and other forms of information.
In the legal field, the types of information being placed online (on the Internet) include court decisions, federal, state, and local statutes, and other governmental information. Law firms make extensive use of the Internet and need to obtain this information to conduct business for their clients. Similarly, the accounting consulting firms and business consulting firms extensively perform business research and competitive intelligence analysis on the Internet. Scientists and engineers often perform scientific and technical research on the Internet.
In many professions, including law firms, accounting firms, management consulting firms, investigators, and financial and business analysts, the expenses incurred in obtaining the information from the Internet must be recovered from the client. The client, in many instances, will insist on a detailed record of the time spent performing research on the Internet. The clients generally require a detailed list of the work performed including the web sites visited, the time spent on each web site, and what was accomplished.
Traditional methods for time tracking include manually entering ¼ hour increments on time sheets, or manually entering time increments into a time tracking program running on a mainframe or a personal computer. Some traditional time tracking systems utilize computers and allow lawyers, and other professionals, to select client matter numbers that allocate time to the appropriate client matter, and generate the corresponding charge on an invoice in an electronic manner. Yet, even in these computer-based systems, the time entries and associated charges must be manually entered as a direct interface to the Internet, for the purpose of time tracking does not exist.
In addition to time tracking systems, professionals such as lawyers have access to proprietary commercial databases, which they can use for research. These databases contain information that is commonly termed primary source material, and includes court decisions and other critical information. In the past, the time spent researching on these databases and the database charges were tracked and charged to the client.
Thus, as primary source materials migrate onto the Internet and as more and more professionals (users) use the Internet for access to these materials, the difficulty in tracking and billing for this time increases tremendously, due to the lack of appropriate systems. This results in lost billable time and the increase of costs for manual entry of time records, for the companies and law firms using the Internet.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a system and method that can be used to track time spent on the Internet or other network, to monitor sites visited, and to report back the amount of time spent at each site.